Are we all homers in regards to our prospects?

Seems that most non Wings fans believe the prospect pool is all hype simply because they are the Wings and drafted Z and Dats 15 years ago. No star players, the prospects on the brink of full time NHL spots are too old, etc

Do we all overrate the Wings prospect pool? I mean; how good is it really?

I think some of them get overrated. Examples: Backman, Pulkkinen, Athanasiou, Marchenko, Almquist. Sometimes we talk about those guys like they're on par with the Jarnkroks and Mrazeks, but they still have a very long way to go.

But we have compelling reasons to believe that Jarnkrok, Mrazek, Jurco, Sproul, Ouellet, Jensen, etc. could be good players, namely because of on-ice success and awards and that sort of thing. It's perfectly logical to be high on this group of prospects.

I don't think we have the next Lidstrom, Datsyuk, or Zetterberg in our pipeline.

I do think we have some middle-top pairing d-men and some top6 forwards though. Nyquist, Tatar, Frk, Jurco. Definitely top6 material. Some very good talent there. Sproul, Ouellete, have a good ceiling too. Mrazek is obviously playing very well. Roy? Brodeur? Hasek? No. But even if he's just as good as Jimmy, that's a huge success.

You don't need superstars to win. A well-balanced team with good depth can and do often win.

I don't think we have the next Lidstrom, Datsyuk, or Zetterberg in our pipeline.

I do think we have some middle-top pairing d-men and some top6 forwards though. Nyquist, Tatar, Frk, Jurco. Definitely top6 material. Some very good talent there. Sproul, Ouellete, have a good ceiling too. Mrazek is obviously playing very well. Roy? Brodeur? Hasek? No. But even if he's just as good as Jimmy, that's a huge success.

You don't need superstars to win. A well-balanced team with good depth can and do often win.

I'd like to see the Wings model themselves after the Bruins. Balanced scoring, 2 way players, great defense. Granted, we don't have a Chara type player to anchor the defense but still.

I think we have a top 10 pool, in the 7-10 range though I could see us around 12.

What we do have, according to HFs definition, is 3 1st line talents in Mrazek, Nyquist & Smith. Smith had a rough year but I still have high hopes in him & it's most definitely not time to panic about him yet. Nyquist is still a potential top line forward who could give us 70-80 points. Lastly we have Mrazek who is a goalie but he is considered to be a top 5 goalie by most people. He could very well be a top 10 goalie in him prime.

After those guys we have a lot of surrounding talent, Tatar, Jurco, Ouellet, Sproul, etc. those guys all have top 6 potential/top 4 potential but they also all have the slight chance to become top line guys. The defenceman we'll have a better idea by this time next year & same goes for guys like Jurco, Mantha & Frk. After them we have the next tier with Jensen, Almqvist, AA, Ferraro, Glendening, Nastasiuk, Backman, Marchenko etc. Those guys all project to be bottom 2 dman or middle 6/bottom 6 forwards. Some of them like Backman & Marchenko could become a #3 if everything goes right but we'll need more time to see what happens this year.

We have a lot of depth & most people just assume because we've been good for so long or we've talked about the same prospects for so long that they must be busts or have something wrong them. We know that we like to have our guys "overripped" but other teams fans take that as being busts. The other thing at play may be that the other fans may just dislike us & are secretly wishing that we crash & burn.

But most of those polls/threads are because of my doing so for that I apologize. A couple people said some ridiculous things, ie: almost everyone would trade MacKinnon for the Wings prospect pool, so I may have said some things that annoyed them.

I'd like to see the Wings model themselves after the Bruins. Balanced scoring, 2 way players, great defense. Granted, we don't have a Chara type player to anchor the defense but still.

Why do you think the Red Wings have made it to the playoffs 22 years in a row?

They did the whole "balanced lines full of two way players" WAY before the Bruins ever found it out. Or did you forget Hart winning Sergei Fedorov being played as a D-man... or Pavel Datsyuk and Nick Lidstrom making the Selke and Norris trophy races a race for second place?

Why do you think the Red Wings have made it to the playoffs 22 years in a row?

They did the whole "balanced lines full of two way players" WAY before the Bruins ever found it out. Or did you forget Hart winning Sergei Fedorov being played as a D-man... or Pavel Datsyuk and Nick Lidstrom making the Selke and Norris trophy races a race for second place?

We had star players also.... Fedorov, Datsyuk, Zetterberg, etc...

The likeliehood of us pulling another Datsyuk or Zetterberg from our prospects is slim. Yes, we had balanced scoring but we still had superstars. So like I said, more balanced scoring rather than relying on a few star guys to be the offensive catalysts.

Seems that most non Wings fans believe the prospect pool is all hype simply because they are the Wings and drafted Z and Dats 15 years ago. No star players, the prospects on the brink of full time NHL spots are too old, etc

Do we all overrate the Wings prospect pool? I mean; how good is it really?

It not just hype. Our drafting wasn't impressive until 2009. Also development at Griffins sucked the latest years under fraser. Since 2009 there has been great drafts when Jim Nill started hitting home-runs and now we are seeing greater development results at same time from Blashill.

Ous kids will be serious factor to the future succes, I have no doubt about that. At 2008 I was looking that we are really going down, but everything has changed after that. The results of the draft/development turnaround are coming in near years. 2009 drafted guys are now 22-year old.

Outsiders can't see it yet, because they compare everything in the past, for those mediocre years before 2009.

Sure we do, so does everyone else. The problem with evaluating prospects is you want to always believe the ceiling. So really a best case scenario is always present. What that causes is over-valuing. You are unlikely to do it as often with other teams prospects. So everyone really over-inflates. This also assumes you understand prospect pools in general. Not everyone follows prospects, and certainly a lot of peoples knowledge drop off once you get off your team or out of your division. So a lot of people universally panning it have no idea what they are talking about and you can see that when they leave certain players completely out of our pool.

However, the current treatment of our prospect pool is pretty much laughable by a lot of people. I see no reason not to defend it. Plus a lot of the logic just doesn't meet up. I hear a lot about how we haven't developed talent since Pavel and Zetterberg. Not really the case, plus if the Red Wings pipeline has been overrated for a while, how does a team that continues to be mostly homegrown succeed.

Finally this is as good as our pipeline has been since the late 80's and early 90's. We will see if it pans out, but this is as good as it has been in some 20 years so I have no problem with people being excited about that, they should be.

By the way it is high time we start calling Mrazek elite.

Prospect goalies that have won the Calder this past decade: Price, Holtby, Pavelec, and Lehner. You win the Calder as a goalie at a young age you project as a #1 or are a number 1. Petr has entered the elite category, he is in a fight with Gibson for best goalie prospect in all of hockey.

Yeah, but all fans do. We are no different really. That being said, I really like the pool of prospects we have developed. We need one or two to really overachieve, but at the same time, we don't have a ton of guys you can definitively say will never play in the NHL. Most of our prospects won't make it, but that is no reason not to be excited about them.